by Marci Shore
Dr. Berman was introspective. He spoke thoughtfully of his father. His parents, he told me, were marginalized when they came to Israel. That his father became a member of the Israeli Knesset was in essence an accident. It was 1951 and he barely spoke Hebrew. His son, a young child then, was the ghost author of his Hebrew-language articles.
“Perhaps it’s just my family pride,” Dr. Berman mused, “but I think that Jakub, if he were not Jewish, would have been number one in Poland, and Bierut … perhaps number three. Bierut was not as bright as Jakub.”
Of this there was a broad consensus: after the war, Jakub Berman had been the best-educated member of the Party’s Central Committee. Stalin would have gladly made Jakub Berman the central defendant in a show trial, the Polish Rudolf Slánský. But Poland’s communist leader, Bolesław Bierut, protected Jakub Berman: after all, Bierut needed him.
Jakub Berman had lived until his eighties. Adolf’s son, though, believed his uncle’s life had been shortened by a car accident that preceded his death by some three years. Jakub had been driving through Warsaw to the Jewish cemetery to visit family graves. Had it really been an accident? Dr. Berman wondered if perhaps Jakub had been a scapegoat.
Emanuel Berman’s cousin, Jakub’s daughter Pani Lucyna—he told me—still remembered how the three brothers used to argue in the years before the war. I had written to Pani Lucyna several times. She had never answered. Emanuel Berman urged me speak to her, and I saw that he didn’t understand that she did not want to speak to me. And at that moment, I also saw how in some sense the Zionist dream had come true: in Israel, in a way that could never have been true in Poland, Emanuel Berman had grown up free.
I told him that in Warsaw I had met his aunt, Pani Irena.
“Irka—Irena,” he said, “was the least intellectual, intelligent but not intellectual, a communist, the adored little sister, kept on the sidelines.”
I showed him the protocol of the 1949 Presidium meeting of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland when Adolf Berman was deposed and replaced by Grzegorz Smolar.
“The demotion must have insulted him very deeply,” Emanuel Berman said to me of his father.
In 1952, Adolf Berman broke with his leftist Zionist party in Israel over the Rudolf Slánský trial: he refused to take an anti-Soviet line against the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Afterward he became a member of the Israeli Knesset representing the Communist Party of Israel.
Now, Emanuel Berman told me, he understood better his father’s decision: “Even if they were not loyal to him, he would be loyal to the cause. He needed to prove that his labor Zionist party really was a leftist party; when it turned out otherwise, he left. By 1956 my father was a communist; he could write to Mirski and say, implicitly: I have a Party card, after all that has happened, I am loyal.”
His father had made peace with all of them, he said, with the exception of Szymon Zachariasz: he had always despised Zachariasz.
After his father’s death, Emanuel Berman donated his father’s papers to the Diaspora Research Institute at Tel Aviv University. The university was closed—the Israeli labor movement had called for a general strike—but the Polish-speaking archivist, a Belarusian émigré to Israel, let me into the archive.
Inside that archive I learned that Adolf Berman had had many friends—Poles and Jews, poets and political activists, famous people and ordinary people.
Before the war, Adolf Berman had been a teacher of psychology and philosophy at a Warsaw high school. In October 1945 his former student Aleksander Masiewicki wrote to him from the town of Olsztyn. Five years earlier Aleksander Masiewicki and his wife had been among some three hundred thousand Polish citizens deported to labor camps in the Soviet interior. Now the war was over, and Masiewicki had been repatriated from the Soviet Union to Poland, where he had accepted a good position as director of a regional Office of Press Control. Yet his tone was anguished. He felt painfully aware that the current leading positions of Polish Jews like himself were the result of the weakness—or rather absence—of a “democratic Polish intelligentsia.” People like himself and Jakub Berman would not be in these roles otherwise; that they were necessary was only the result of a sick organism. Poland—and Polish Jews—needed more drastic medication.
“Today, at once, we must approach our question with a surgical knife, not with a philosophical prescription,” he repeated twice in that long letter.
Aleksander Masiewicki was a communist. He would stay in Poland and build the new world there. He did not believe, as Adolf Berman and the Zionists did, that emigration offered any hope: “I have taken pains to exert my imagination, but I cannot see a place for myself there. And besides—there is no place for us anywhere. We are all eternal wanderers.… To this I must add: I do not like Jews. Specifically I find Jewish mannerisms reprehensible, Jewish ways of behavior offend me tremendously. Often I’m ashamed of Jews. Yet I am one of them!”
During that same year, 1945, letters also arrived from another old friend, this one across the ocean. In the years before the war, Chaim Finkelstein had been the editor of Warsaw’s largest Yiddish newspaper. He and Adolf Berman had known each other for a long time. Chaim Finkelstein knew Jakub well, too; he knew the whole Berman family. Adolf and Jakub’s mother had considered him one of her own children. And she had loved her children very much.
Now Chaim Finkelstein was in New York, desperately hoping for news of his family, pleading with Adolf Berman to find them. He was a man in despair, driven nearly to insanity by the hellish years of waiting, helplessly and far away, for news of the people he loved. Without them life had no meaning for him. Again and again he begged to know something of the fate of his wife and two daughters, of Jakub and his family, of Adolf and his wife Basia, of their brother and sisters.
“With a beating heart I await news from you,” Chaim Finkelstein wrote “About myself I can tell you only that I’m alive (in truth I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve such a punishment).” The letter was dated 20 April 1945, less than three weeks before the Germans surrendered.
That summer of 1945 Jakub Berman sent a telegram: neither Chaim Finkelstein’s wife and older daughter nor Jakub’s sister Anna and brother Mieczysław had been found.
“Is this the final verdict? How can I believe it and how can I reconcile myself to it? And how to live?” Chaim Finkelstein wrote to Adolf that August after the war ended.
Yet one of his two daughters had been found. Awiwa was now fourteen years old; she had survived the war in hiding on the “Aryan Side” of the ghetto walls. At some point she managed to contact Adolf and Jakub Berman, and they helped her. In the months after the war ended, Jakub, Adolf, and Basia Berman managed to arrange for Awiwa to join her father in New York. Europe was still in chaos, and it was a long and difficult process, but in the end they succeeded.
From the moment he learned she was alive, Chaim Finkelstein was desperate to have his daughter with him. Every further hour of separation tormented him. Yet when Awiwa did finally arrive in New York, it was not easy for the father and daughter. Both were in mourning, both were ensconced in guilt. Awiwa did not know why she had survived when her mother and her sister had perished, and she urged her father: they should kill themselves together.
In his letters Chaim Finkelstein said very little about politics. Once, though, he responded to the news of Jakub Berman’s success in postwar Poland:
It’s understood that I’m happy about the news that Jakub has acquired a “higher rank.” But I’m afraid that my pleasure doesn’t originate from the same source as does yours. For me this was only a confirmation that Jakub is still managing to survive, because truthfully stated, what kind of a life is it and how much value do those offices have, if even a man of Jakub’s merit and position does not have the right, or the courage, to write to his brother?
It was true: since 1949, when it became apparent that there would be no Soviet Palestine, that the new Jewish state would not join the Soviet bloc, relations between communis
t Poland and Israel had not been good. These were the years of the “anticosmopolitan” campaign. Contact with Zionists would not have been in Jakub Berman’s interest. So even when Adolf’s wife, Basia, died so terribly prematurely in 1953, it was Jakub Berman’s daughter, Lucyna, who wrote with condolences. His sister, Irena, too, wrote on Jakub’s behalf. She wrote frequently, though her letters nearly always began with apologies for her long silence or with chastisements for Adolf’s. They were warm letters but nearly devoid of deeper content. There were always reports on the family’s health, on Jakub’s heart condition, on who was going on holiday and where. In the letters she never seemed to grow older, never seemed to change.
In the archives, though, the years passed quickly. Chaim Finkelstein’s letters continued uninterrupted for decades.
The “anti-Zionist” campaign of March 1968 had a dramatic effect on Adolf Berman’s correspondence. Friends and comrades he had not spoken to for twenty years now found him again. One of these was his former student Aleksander Masiewicki, and he had a story to tell Adolf Berman.
It was March 1968. A beautiful, sunny morning. Aleksander Masiewicki stared at himself in the mirror—and saw before him a man perhaps about to take his own life, perhaps about to hurl a bomb. Instead he went to a Party meeting, where without saying a word he handed the secretary a piece of paper on which he had written:
“In connection with the campaign being conducted by the Party concerning student activities, a campaign unworthy of the great traditions of our Party and hence villainous, I ask that you remove my name from the list of members of the Polish United Workers’ Party.” I submitted my resignation and signature and still without a word left the room of farewells deep in silence. I felt then a tremendous relief; the nightmare that had throttled me for many years departed. Already long ago I had entertained the thought of finally tearing off of myself that “burning shirt of Deianeira”; I lived in unceasing conflict with my conscience, choking me with disgust. The decision was a difficult one, as it meant self-annihilation, the negation of my entire life. Yet now that this was behind me, I felt absolutely indifferent as to the consequences. I could not have acted differently. I called my wife. I said: “You can congratulate me!” She did not ask what for, at once she understood. For a moment she was silent, then she spoke: “If you’ve made your decision, then good. Now it’s my turn!”
Two years later, now in exile in Brooklyn, Aleksander Masiewicki was pained above all by the separation from his friends.
And how many families have been broken into pieces as a result of these events, how many children have found themselves far from their parents, how many wives have separated from their husbands, how many of the closest friends have been scattered over various continents. In the bill of injuries, which perhaps some day will be presented to that band of gangsters, these torn-apart families and broken friendships will surely not find themselves in last place.
Aleksander Masiewicki, a communist since his youth, now was convinced that the image of an ideal, just society, happy and free, was but a utopia born in the minds of nineteenth-century dreamers. To his former teacher Adolf Berman he wrote:
I no longer nourish illusions that at some time the “ultimate goal”—which generations of fighters for the so-called “better future” have dreamed of—will be achieved. For in reality that “future” will bring (as it cannot be otherwise) new problems, just as (and often still more) complicated as the old ones and bringing upon the ordinary man only the calamities of unhappiness and disillusionment. I have my doubts as to whether “history goes on.”
The Polish-speaking archivist knocked on the door of the room where I sat alone reading Aleksander Masiewicki’s letters and told me that Kenneth Starr’s report on Bill Clinton’s relations with Monica Lewinsky had just been published on the internet.
And then that rare thing happened: I found the other half of Adolf Berman’s correspondence with the communist Michał Mirski, who in the Stalinist years had attacked Adolf Berman so harshly for “bourgeois nationalism.” I learned that in the 1960s Mirski’s daughter had been very ill and that Mirski had sent her to Israel in Adolf Berman’s care, in the hopes that an extended stay in the warmer climate would cure her.
Then came the “anti-Zionist” campaign.
“I am a political emigrant and my homeland is Poland,” Michał Mirski wrote after he’d arrived in Denmark.
The Eternally Wandering Jew
In autumn of 1998, at Stanford, I began to study Yiddish. My teacher, Harvey, was nearing fifty. He spoke several languages and had had at least nine lives: among them as a grape picker, a hat importer, a cabinetmaker, a restorer of old houses, a klezmer revivalist, a teacher of Yiddish. Harvey was a native Yiddish speaker; he’d grown up in New York, the child of Holocaust survivors. His mother was from Romania, his father from Poland, and Yiddish had been the family’s common language.
Harvey had recently visited Warsaw. He described it as “a city that could turn on you at any moment.”
About his parents Harvey said, “People don’t come out of a history like Jewish history healthy.”
The sounds of Yiddish helped me to imagine the years before the war, the years when Warsaw was unimaginable without those sounds. In the end, this was the most important thing I had learned from Adolf Berman’s correspondence with Michał Mirski: that—despite the war, despite the Holocaust, despite everything—these postwar relationships were epilogues to prewar relationships. And if I wanted to understand the convergence of the war and Stalinism, I would have to go back in time, to the decades between the two world wars.
When my friend Mikołaj had come from Budapest to Warsaw the previous year, he’d brought me a present: a book called Lucifer Unemployed, a collection of stories by the Polish poet Aleksander Wat. The tales, written in the 1920s, were parabolic, antiutopian, nihilist. In “The Eternally Wandering Jew,” Nathan, an orphaned Talmudic student from an isolated shtetl named Zebrzydowo, traveled through all of Europe to America in search of his wealthy benefactor. The story, set during a moment when Europe was “cannibalistic, impoverished, mystical, sadistic, prostituted,” invoked as its refrain, “There is always mud in Zebrzydowo.” In New York, now as his wealthy benefactor’s secretary, Nathan conceived of the ideal social world as one that reconciled communism and Catholicism. He insisted that all Jews convert to Catholicism, and the yeshiva student himself became pope. The story ended hundreds of years later, when the last anti-Semites came upon Nathan’s shtetl of Zebrzydowo. There they converted to Judaism and restored the ancient Hebraic traditions.
Aleksander Wat was a friend of Adam Ważyk, the author of the “Poem for Adults” I had read with my Polish teacher Pani Hanka in Toronto. In the early 1920s, as young men, Aleksander Wat and Adam Ważyk had been futurists and Dadaists, enamored of the avant-garde poets Guillaume Apollinaire, Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Later, at different moments, they became the most fanatical of communists. It was to Sepp, a professor of literature who had abandoned Bavaria for Northern California, that I came with the question: How did these poets make the leap from Dadaism to communism, from radical contingency and radical nihilism to radical utopianism and radical determinism?
Sepp was writing a book about the year 1926. It was the era of the avant-garde—painters, poets, graphic artists, organizers of “happenings”—when art began to understand itself as no longer reflecting the world but rather creating it. For the avant-garde, Sepp explained, the pleasure—the thrill—was in the moment of crossing the boundary, leaping across the border from representation to transformation.
“Once you’ve crossed,” Sepp told me, “you have nowhere else to go.”
There was only pure contingency—which was misery, unbearable. And so, in a world of pure contingency, the existential imperative was to make a choice, to take some decisive action.
This—the imperative to choose, to embrace one’s freedom and one’s responsibility—was the philosophy of Jean-Paul
Sartre, the French existentialism that had so haunted the Czechoslovak writers in the 1960s.
I CONTACTED YIVO in New York. YIVO, the Institute for Jewish Research, had once made its home in Vilnius. Now, since the Second World War, the institute resided in New York. I asked the archivist there about Chaim Finkelstein, who had once been the editor of interwar Poland’s largest Yiddish newspaper.
Yes, the archivist told me, the scholars at YIVO had known Chaim Finkelstein well; he had worked with YIVO for years and had lived a long life, dying just several years earlier.
I wrote then to Emanuel Berman in Tel Aviv, asking if he knew how to contact Chaim Finkelstein’s daughter, Awiwa, who by now would be in her sixties. Emanuel responded with Awiwa’s address. A few days later he wrote again: he had spoken to his cousins, Jakub Berman’s daughter and son-in-law in Warsaw, and they believed that Chaim Finkelstein was still alive.
This seemed unlikely: if Chaim Finkelstein had grown up with the Berman brothers and lived still, by now he would be very, very old. I was headed to New York for a conference, and I sent a letter to Awiwa, giving her the phone number of my brother on the Upper West Side.
The very first day I arrived my brother and sister-in-law got a voice-mail message. They were very excited: the message was from Chaim Finkelstein himself, back from the dead.
I telephoned right away. Chaim Finkelstein was indeed still alive, and living with his second wife in a modest apartment in Co-op City in the Bronx. He had been born in the nineteenth century and was now one hundred years old.